Revival of ‘Ghost Sonata’ Dances to a Master’s Tune

Every few years--whether we know we need it or not--Ingmar Bergman electrifies the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a bolt of his visionary theater. And, in the zap of an evening, we are stunned yet again with the power of a permanent acting ensemble, with the importance of marrow-deep understanding of style and a master to transform theory and text into living, breathing, sweating stage genius. These visits from the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden are always an event, one of the great things about cultural life in New York City.

This week’s offering, which runs through Sunday at the academy’s funkier sister theater, the Harvey, is Bergman at his untouchable best. “The Ghost Sonata,” one of the more obscure of the late chamber plays that August Strindberg wrote for his own short-lived theater, clamps its jaws on the nervous system the moment the student crawls up a ramp on his belly. And, some 100 minutes later, this astonishing piece makes us regret the release of the bite. Bergman, of course, gave up movies for the theater after “Fanny and Alexander” in 1982, and, as we have learned since his New York directing debut in 1988, the theater is hardly a fall-back retirement diversion.

“The movies are my mistress,” Bergman is famous for having said, “but the theater is my wife.” His productions have been at least as wildly varied as his films--a “Miss Julie” so realistic that the cook fried real meat, an updated and surprisingly violent “Hamlet,” a starkly unforgettable “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” that made his connection with Eugene O’Neill more visceral than with Shakespeare.

With “Ghost Sonata,” the effect has the sculptural Expressionism of the darkest Martha Graham dance, yet is as entertaining as a popcorn thriller. This 1907 power play, written in the hallucinatory style of the years after Strindberg’s bouts with madness, is bludgeoned with feelings of universal guilt among the undead. But the drama is also a juicy vampire story, a psychological mystery that drips with irony and gossipy glee.

Bergman attacks the theater with the shifting dramas of light and dark, the erotic and intellectual weight of his best films. Here, for all the corrosive grotesquerie and spoiled innocence, he is obviously also having a lot of fun. He gives as good as he gets.

The “sonata,” in three sections, begins in the town square after a student--played with easygoing sensuality by Jonas Malmsjo--has just become a hero by saving people from a crumbling building. The man in the jaunty linen suit meets Hummel, an old man in a wheelchair who suggests he had been a destructive force on the boy’s father and who promises to make it up to him with fortune.

Naturally, nothing is as it appears. Hummel--played with delicious meanness by Jan Malmsjo, the young actor’s father--has been an evil force on other families, including the one with the beautiful daughter with the mother who lives in the closet and thinks she is a parrot. Instead of being foolish, the mother is played with exquisite dead-soul humanity by Gunnel Lindblom. Elin Klinga embodies the daughter as an unreal, eerie combination of spirit and catatonia.

The rest of the company is equally marvelous. Bergman, a master builder of detail, finds the surreal gestures that identify each character in suffering and remorse and foolishness. Instead of Beethoven’s music, Bergman significantly uses the harsher, more modern yearnings of Bela Bartok. Goran Wassberg’s set is a deceptively simple expanse of black drapes and projections. Anna Bergman’s costumes have the perfect look of horror show and elegance. As Strindberg says here, “Silence can hide anything but words cannot.”

We miss some words in the Swedish, despite unobtrusive simultaneous translations, but the wordlessness is golden.

*

“The Ghost Sonata.” By August Strindberg, directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set by Goran Wassberg, costumes by Anna Bergman, lights by Pierre Leveau, choreography by Virpi Pahkinen. Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, Fulton Street off Flatbush Avenue. In Swedish with simultaneous translations. Through Sunday.